Digital printers are in common use today for many production processes ranging from printing of a single document to large scale production of multiple copies of documents. These printers receive print jobs in two basic manners. In a typical networked system, the print jobs are submitted through the network. Alternatively, the print job could be entered through the printer user interface. In any event, when the print job is submitted through the network or printer user interface, the print operator enters certain data. This data is often referred to as job ticket data and contains the print job parameters or the print job features. The data includes information about certain characteristics of the job, such as paper size, and paper handling and finishing instructions, including setup instructions for the necessary finishing devices to be used in completing the print job. Such setup information is generally entered in an operator message that will be displayed on the printer user interface when the job arrives at the printer.
When a print job is entered through the network interface, the job is placed in a print server queue on the network, until a slot opens in the raster image processor (RIP) queue in the printer system. When the print job is transferred to the RIP queue, it is assigned a print job number and the RIP generates an operator message, if one is associated with the print job. The setup instructions for a given print job are displayed on the printer user interface as an operator message. The operator message informs the operator that a certain print job requires custom setup, and specifies the particular setup parameters. However, while the setup instructions for a particular job are displayed on the printer user interface, it is typically not possible to display the entirety of the set up information. Typical printer displays only allow the display of only a limited amount of information in an operator message, for example sixty-three characters, thereby imposing restrictions on the amount of instructions that may displayed at a given time on the printer user interface. This results in a limited amount of information being provided to the operator, possibly in a cryptic, abbreviated fashion, making it difficult for inexperienced operators to properly setup the machine and making it more likely that even experienced operators will misunderstand the instructions.
In addition, more and more documents are being created that include pages that have color and pages that have simply black and white text. Historically, to run such a print job one of two methods were followed. One way would be to run the entire job on a color printer. While this method saves time it is a poor use of the color printer as a resource. Generally, the demand for color printing is high and its use is more expensive. It is a waste of the value of the printer to produce pages that have no color on a color printer.
Another method was to separate those pages that include color from those pages that do not and print each set of documents on separate printers. After the printing was completed the document was assembled manually to reinsert the color pages back into the document. While this process has the advantage of the most efficient use of the equipment, it entails a tremendous amount of manual labor and requires the operator to maintain records as to the original organization of the document for proper reassembly.
Therefore, there is a need to improve the process of printing hybrid documents that contain both color and non-color pages.